Frantz Fanon

Their big question

How does being ruled change how you see yourself?

Fanon’s question is one that the tradition had mostly not asked: what does it do to a mind to live inside a system that says you are less?

His answer, written in his twenties, was that the damage is real and specific. He described the effort of translating yourself for people who see you through a stereotype — taking the version of yourself the world expects and trying to live in it, because the alternative is being invisible. He thought this was not a private problem of confidence but a structural one, produced by the way the categories were set up, and he described it precisely enough that people recognise it immediately.

He was a psychiatrist, which shapes how he writes. He is interested in what happens to people, not what should be said about them, and he resists two comfortable positions at once. He will not accept the story that the colonised are naturally inferior, and he will not accept the flattering version in which all that is needed is to be recognised by the people doing the dominating. In his account, recognition given from above is still a relationship of dependence.

He also insisted on a way out, which is easy to forget because the last book is famously fierce. He wrote that he was not a prisoner of history — that the meaning of a life is not settled by what has been done to it.

“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek the meaning of my destiny there.”

From Black Skin, White Masks — an argument against accepting a life shaped in advance by what has been done to you.

Three things worth knowing

• He trained as a psychiatrist and worked in a hospital in Algeria during the war of independence, treating both the colonised and the soldiers sent to control them.
• He wrote Black Skin, White Masks in 1952 while still in his twenties, mixing psychology, literature and philosophy.
• The Wretched of the Earth was finished as he was dying and published in 1961, and it changed the vocabulary of anti-colonial argument worldwide.

Try it — think like Frantz

Notice one thing you assume about yourself that came from somebody else's opinion — a limit on what you are good at, or what people like you do. Write down where you first heard it.

We have no portrait of Frantz that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.